Pimp-Slapped

My advisor is hosting a visiting professor. He's only in town from Japan for 2 days, and while I don't know what the rest of his itinerary includes, I can tell you that Day 1 of his trip has included a great deal of ass-kicking.

The most noteworthy (as far as I know) of his various academic smackdowns came during his visit to my lab. He listened intently as Tiff, Kim, and I explained and demonstrated our research. The clarification questions he asked were good, not "I should ask a question to feign interest". In spite of a considerable language barrier, it became clear that dude-san knows his stuff.

I mentioned that I wasn't clear on why a particular value in my derivation of "adaptation" kept being approximately 0. There are a few possibilities that I'd considered, but nothing was really standing out as the answer.

"Maybe your task is too simple", he posited. BAM. A pimp-slap if there ever was one, but sometimes you need to get pimp-slapped to see the light. Holy crap. Of course! The subjects' adapatation was too rapid, because the task was too simple, and the brief linear increase in "G" (don't worry about it) was drowned out by inherent biological variability. It's so damn simple!

So, I've got my work cut out for me. Lit review, experimental design, Labview coding, data collection, data analysis. Yowza. I swear, though, I love being in this position. It is the equivalent of a crit racer, sitting in the top 10 with 2 to go, suddenly seeing the gaps that he's going to use to get to the sprint. I am the midfielder, seeing the holes in the defense that will let the ball move from midfield to the back of the net. The veil is lifted. God, this feels good.

I got out of the lab just in time to join the usual suspects for a recovery ride. Everyone but Jenks and Will P. wore full Rutgers kit, which made the whole ride a lot safer (I never wear anything else outdoors anymore). We did the Monday Night Loop, which involves laps around Busch and Livingston campuses, also known as "the cool kids' campuses". Pimp-slap #2 came during the first lap, when Jenks initiated a rousing BikeCapella chorus of Bohemian Rhapsody, which is by Queen, you philistines. That's right. Thanks to Jenks, we pimp-slapped the recovery ride upside its frozen windy head.

The final pimp-slap was, once again, directed at me, as well as CaptainChaz, PlaidRich, and 53x12Will, the sole survivors of lap 2. Somewhere around the Watermelon Loop course (3/4 of the way into the lap) it began to hail. I'm all for epic conditions, but not on a recovery day. Oof. Touche, Mother Nature.

For dinner (thus far) I had 4 "servings" of rice and a tall glass of Endurox. Delicious. I'm gonna go ahead and give this day a 9/10. La Vida e Boa.